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book history

Emoji Dick is a crowd sourced and crowd funded translation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into Japanese emoji. Emoji, like this set for the iPhone, is a pre-set collection of small pictures that reflect actions, feelings, and locations in small, cute pictures:

Each of the approx. 10,000 sentences in Melville’s original text has been reinterpreted in the emoji ‘language’ via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers and published with funds from Kickstarter.

Last week, the Library of Congress announced that Emoji Dick would be catalogued and added to the history books as the first-ever emoji title. Gaze upon it!

…A record for an obscure pamphlet may never be directly used, but it will stand for decades, maybe centuries, as the signpost to that pamphlet. A blog post is a bit of flotsam thrown into a sea of unstructured data.